Israel targeted Hamas leaders with airstrikes over the weekend. Hamas said one of the targets, Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, was still alive but provided no confirmation.
Israel’s military said that one of Mr. Deif’s top deputies, Rafa'a Salameh, commander of Hamas’s Khan Yunis Brigade, was killed in the attack on July 13. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after the raid, “There still isn’t absolute certainty” that Mr. Deif was dead.
Mr. Netanyahu said all of Hamas’s leaders are “marked for death” and that killing them would move Hamas closer to accepting a cease-fire deal.
Hamas on July 14 said that the Gaza cease-fire talks were ongoing and that Mr. Deif was in good health. The terrorist group has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007 after winning an election in 2006.
Palestinian health officials said the airstrike, at a designated humanitarian zone of Al Mawasi near Khan Yunis, killed at least 90 Palestinians and wounded as many as 300. Palestinian health authorities, controlled by Hamas, do not distinguish between civilian and military casualties.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stated on July 13, “The IDF’s Southern Command and the IAF (Israeli Air Force) carried out a strike in an area where two senior Hamas terrorists and additional terrorists hid among civilians. The location of the strike was an open area surrounded by trees, several buildings, and sheds.”
Related Stories
Accompanying an IDF social media post were aerial photos. The first centered on a building surrounded by trees, with other buildings further away. The second photo shows the crater left by the attack, indicating most of the damage was done to the target building and the trees.
Witnesses said the attack occurred in an area that Israel had designated as safe for hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians. Israel’s military would not confirm that.
Mr. Deif has topped Israel’s most-wanted list and has been in hiding for years.
Mr. Salameh said the IDF, in a social media post, “was one of the masterminds of the October 7th Massacre.”
Mr. Salameh, as commander previously of Hamas’s Khan Yunis-Al Qarara Battalion, “played a significant role in the abduction of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit,” who was held hostage for five years until released in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinians.
Replacing Mohammed Sinwar as Khan Yunis Brigade commander in 2016, he commanded terrorist operatives and “was responsible for all launches of projectiles” fired from the Khan Yunis area toward Israel. He commanded two terror tunnels that figured in a 2021 incident wherein 18 terrorists attempting to infiltrate Israeli territory were “eliminated,” the IDF said.
Strike Near Lebanon-Syria Border
In another targeted strike, a drone on July 15 destroyed a car near the Lebanon-Syria border, killing a prominent Syrian businessman sanctioned by the United States and with close ties to Syrian President Bashar Assad.The businessman, Mohammed Baraa Katerji, 48, was killed near Saboura, a few kilometers inside Syria while driving in his SUV on the highway linking Syria with Lebanon. A Britain-based Syrian opposition group said Mr. Katerji was apparently targeted because he used to fund the “Syrian resistance” against Israel in the Golan Heights, territory Israel conquered from Syria in 1967’s Six Day War.
Mr. Katerji was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in 2018 as President Bashar al-Assad’s middleman trading oil with the Islamic State terrorist group and for facilitating weapons shipments from Iraq to Syria.
The Katerji Company, a trucking company, shipped weapons, sometimes under the guise of importing food, from Iraq to Syria.
A drone strike along the same highway on July 9 killed a Hezbollah commander and a one-time bodyguard of the terrorist group’s leader. Israel has not formally taken responsibility either for that attack or that on Mr. Katerji.
The United Nations said on July 15 that it would bring in more armored vehicles and personal protection equipment for its humanitarian aid operations after receiving approval from Israeli authorities.
The UN has long blamed Israel for slow aid deliveries to Gaza but acknowledged recently it was facing “total lawlessness” there. Armed gangs wait for trucks to loot them, plus Hamas seizes much of the food aid.
“The truck drivers that we use have been regularly threatened or assaulted. They’ve become less and less willing, understandably, to move assistance from the border crossings to our warehouses and then on to the people that are in need,” said Scott Anderson, deputy humanitarian coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Mr. Anderson said that less than 100 UN aid trucks get through daily. Commercial deliveries do better, but he said they “pay essentially protection money to the families in the south and they also have armed guards.”
The European Union on July 15 announced sanctions against five Israelis and three Israeli groups it described as responsible for “serious and systematic human rights abuses” against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The list included Tzav 9, a group that the EU said had regularly blocked humanitarian aid trucks delivering food, water, and fuel to the Gaza Strip.
Also on the list were Ben-Zion Gopstein, founder and leader of the Lehava group, and Isaschar Manne, described as the founder of an unauthorized outpost in the West Bank, which many Israelis call Judea and Samaria.
The United States has also sanctioned the group and the two men. The sanction includes an asset freeze and a travel ban to EU countries.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
